June 29th, 2010

Today was another day of Russian. I started copying out the exercise sentences from lesson 52 of Russian without Toil, but was diverted by other things after four or five of them. Specifically, I copied out the condensed table of Russian noun declensions from Terence Wade’s Comprehensive Russian Grammar onto a sturdy piece of paper (think Iversen green sheets).

After that, I copied out the first four or five sentences from Stranitsy Istorii by Syrov. Thanks to Iversen providing the full publication details at the HTLAL forums, I was able to find the book. It’s a history book designed for learners of Russian with all of the accents marked. Anyway, after copying each sentence, I looked up all of the words and figured out the declensions of things. It was certainly slow going, but it was nice to read the whole paragraph and feel that I actually got most of it (after a fair amount of work). There was one construction I was somewhat baffled by, though:

Советскую страну населяет более сотни различных народов.

As best as I can make out, this comes out something like:

(The) Soviet country [accusative] inhabit more hundreds of various / different peoples.

I get the gist of it, but the usage of более has me a bit puzzled. My dictionary shows it as meaning “more.” However, “more than” seems to be более чем, and so the lonely более evades me somewhat.

Google Translate spits this out for the above sentence:

Soviet country is inhabited by over a hundred different nations.

That’s more or less how I understood it, but I don’t really get how более standing alone comes out to “over.”